UNDERGRADUATE II YEAR SUBJECT: English Language & Literature TOPIC: James Joyce, “Araby” LESSON MAP: 8.3.C.1 Duration: 29:31 min James Joyce, “Araby” James Joyce – An Introduction During the next half-­‐an-­‐hour, we are going to be discussing James Joyce and his short story “Araby.” Though Joyce is considered perhaps the most cosmopolitan of modernist writers, he was, above all, an Irishman. All his writings are set in Ireland. The later ones, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), are replete with allusions to Irish history, mythology and folklore. Dublin, the capital city of Ireland, registers its living presence in Ulysses with details of locations, landmarks and shops. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 into a Catholic family as the first among the ten children of John Stanislaus Joyce and May Joyce. John Joyce was an improvident man of unstable income who had made a reckless cult of squandering scarce familial resources, especially in drinking. The assets depleted, and the family, which also witnessed John’s violence, lacked resources even to meet basic needs. James Joyce was educated at Clongowes Wood College, an elite boarding school run by the Jesuits. Due to declining familial circumstances, he had to be shifted to Belvedere College, a cheaper day-­‐school version of Clongowes Wood. The Jesuit education had a deep impact upon his worldview. Even when he rebelled against the doctrines of the Catholic Church, Joyce acknowledged the contribution of the Jesuits to his thinking. After completing his school education, he studied at the Catholic National University, which was to later become University College, Dublin. In 1903 Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, a project which did not materialize. This was the beginning of a self-­‐imposed ‘exile.’ Upon his mother’s death, he briefly returned to Dublin. On 12 June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a waitress at Finn’s Hotel in Dublin. On 16 June he took a walk with her to the nearby village Ringsend. James Joyce had fallen in love. He was to immortalize the day for literature by setting his magnum opus Ulysses on 16 June 1904, a day that was to become famous as Bloomsday (after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of the novel). Joyce and Nora settled in Trieste, an Italian city that was then part of the Austro-­‐Hungarian empire. Due to Joyce’s ideological opposition to the church and its ceremonies, they lived together unmarried till 1931, when they had to register their marriage “for testamentary reasons.” His relationship to Nora was marked by an intense passion, an equally intense jealousy and common suffering – poverty, frequent displacements (mainly due to the two world wars) and their daughter Lucia’s mental illness. Joyce and his family lived the rest of their life in Trieste, Pola, Rome, Paris and Zürich. The financial support of patrons like Harriet Shaw Weaver, a wealthy English suffragist, helped him concentrate on his literary endeavours. After his works began to come out, he was surrounded by a large group consisting of fellow writers, including Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, friends and well wishers. Joyce had become a literary celebrity. He suffered from severe ophthalmic problems throughout his life and had to undergo a series of surgeries in the eye. The fact that in his last work, Finnegans Wake, the sound of words matters more than the sight of them, perhaps, has to do with his weakening eyesight. A loud reading reveals the hidden words and enriches the meaning of the text. Joyce died of a perforated stomach ulcer in Zürich in 1941. Joyce’s Works Joyce’s works are heavily intersexual, and it is difficult to identify a few authors who influenced him. Nevertheless, we may mention the influence of the naturalistic narrative techniques of the French novelist Gustavo Flaubert, and of Henrik Ibsen’s myth of the artist as a tragic hero persecuted by society. On the Continent, Joyce was exposed to the world of avant-­‐garde arts. This was the time when movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism and Cubism were making their presence felt. Expressionism sought to present the world from a subjective point of view and resorted to distortions for emotional effect. The Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896-­‐1963) and the German painter Hans Arp (1887-­‐1966) were launching their assault on bourgeois notions of propriety and decorum in life and art with the irrationality of their random art, which they called Dada. Joyce also had a gift for languages. He knew Latin, Italian and some Irish. He learnt Dano-­‐
Norwegian to read Ibsen, and spoke German and French fluently. A true polymath, he was to turn this gift to good account in Finnegans Wake, which employs about two dozen languages. Joyce’s first major publication was a collection of lyrical poems called Chamber Music (1912). He was to publish another collection of poems entitled Pomes Penyeach in 1927. But he is better known for his fictional writings, through which he endeavoured to redefine the concept of fiction itself. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his first novel, was published in 1916. It is widely considered an autobiographical work, one written by the author in maturity with a retrospective understanding of his formative years. The Portrait is a Bildungsroman, or a novel of education. It traces the growth of a sensitive and gifted young Catholic man named Stephen Dedalus who aspires to become an artist. In 1918 Joyce published a play entitled Exiles. Joyce’s later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are more intricate in form and encyclopaedic in content than the earlier ones. The self-­‐conscious word play of these works, their unconventional narrative techniques and stylistic innovations changed commonly held views on language, representation, meaning and reading. Ulysses is a monumental contribution to the world of letters. It was published in 1922. It narrates the non-­‐events of a single day in the lives of its main characters – Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser and an apostate Jew; his wife and a soprano, Molly Bloom; and Stephen Dedalus, a fellow Dubliner and now a schoolteacher. Joyce employs the mythical framework of Homer’s Odyssey to narrate this story. A typical high-­‐modernist novel, the chief interest of Ulysses lies not in its plot but in its formal complexity. For instance, the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter is written in a pastiche of styles ranging from the early Latinate prose in English to Charles Dickens and Walter Pater. In a chapter, which narrates happenings in a maternity hospital, these styles trace the growth of the English language, which in turn is made to parallel the growth of the foetus in the womb. In Ulysses Joyce employs what is popularly called the “stream-­‐of-­‐consciousness” technique of narration. Here the narrative advances through the thoughts of the characters. Though he uses the same technique in the Portrait, it is in Ulysses that the possibilities of the technique are fully utilized. The book also creates meaning at multiple levels. Joyce told his French translator, Benoîst-­‐Méchin, in a lighter vein: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is an obscure book for the ordinary reader. In the broadest terms, Finnegans Wake is the cosmic dream of an archetypal man. The nominal narrative of the work tells the story of a Chapelizod publican called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker; his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is also a personification of River Liffey (which runs through Dublin); their twin sons, Shem and Shaun; and their young daughter, Issy. The events of the nominal narrative are linked up with historical, mythical and literary parallels. The Wake also incorporates the sixteenth-­‐century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s scheme of cyclical history. Besides multiple languages, the work uses myriad portmanteau words, puns and a thoroughly unconventional syntax. Reading Finnegans Wake is like solving a puzzle. A Critical Summary of “Araby” “Araby”' is one of the fifteen short stories that together make up James Joyce's collection, Dubliners. Although Joyce wrote the stories between 1904 and 1906, he had great difficulty getting them published. Finally, Dubliners came out in print in 1914. It was his first fictional work. The stories present life in the Irish capital in terms of what Joyce called “paralysis,” a moral and material malaise that debilitated destinies. In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, Joyce stated his purpose in writing the stories: “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.” He said that he had written the stories in what he called “a style of scrupulous meanness.” Dubliners are not a random collection. Joyce organized them into stories of childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. They are arranged in an order reflecting the development of a child into a grown man. “Araby” is the last of the “childhood” stories. It is narrated in first-­‐person, partly from the perspective of an unnamed boy who is on the verge of adolescence. The first-­‐person mode of narration enables Joyce to capture the boy’s complex and changing moods. The story “Araby” takes its title from a real oriental festival, which came to Dublin when Joyce was twelve years old. The story opens on North Richmond Street in Dublin. The boy-­‐narrator lives with his aunt and uncle. Probably, his parents are no more. He describes his block, and discusses the former tenant of the house: a priest who recently died. The priest has a library that attracts the young boy. He expresses his interest in three titles: a Sir Walter Scott romance, a religious tract, and a police agent’s memoirs. The narrator is part of the group of boys who play in the street. He then talks about a character called Mangan’s sister. The name Mangan seems to be borrowed from the nineteenth-­‐century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, who interested Joyce. “Mangan’s sister” is a girl who captivates the boy’s imagination. But he is shy. He hardly speaks with her, but stares at her from his window and follows her on the street, and often thinks of her. These are moments he relishes. Life on North Richmond Street is drab. It is only the children’s play, which animates the place. The children are interested in the happenings of the adult world. They are on the brink of sexual awareness, as is clear from the way they observe Mangan’s sister. The narrator himself idealizes her in a romantic way. In a typical case of adolescent infatuation, his feelings are so intense that any communication is rendered difficult. When he gets to speak to her she asks him whether he is going to Araby, an oriental fair that has come to Dublin. The girl gloomily states that she will not be able to go to Araby as she has already committed to attend a school retreat. Then the boy gallantly offers to bring her something from the fair. Enthralled by his new love, he restlessly waits to go to the Araby bazaar. He wants to get some grand gift for his beloved that will endear him to her. He cannot pay attention to the classes. His romanticized image of Mangan’s sister gets merged with that of Arabia. But in order to actually go to the bazaar and to buy the gift, he is dependent on the adults of his household. On the morning of the proposed visit, he reminds his uncle that he has to attend the event, and requests him to come home early. But the happenings in the evening are disappointing. His aunt frets, and a guest pay a visit. The boy waits impatiently. His uncle, perhaps intoxicated, arrives late from work, around 9 pm. He equivocates so much that he almost keeps the narrator from going. These show the insensitivity of the adult world to the needs of the young. Though it is late, the narrator heads out of the house towards the bazaar, tightly clenching a florin. The boy reaches the bazaar at 10 pm. The moment is what Joyce would have called an epiphany, a sudden revelation. Here, it is a negative epiphany. The Araby market turns out not to be the fantastic place the boy had hoped it would be. It is late, and most of the stalls are closed. The only sound he can hear is the fall of coins as men count their vmoney. When he stops at one of the few open stalls, the young woman managing the stall is engaged in a frivolous conversation with two young men. Though the boy is potentially a customer, she only grudgingly and briefly waits on him. He fails to buy anything for his beloved. His romantic, idealized vision of Araby is destroyed. So is his idealized vision of Mangan’s sister, and of love. He exits the bazaar with shame and anger rising within him. Interpreting “Araby” The short story “Araby” needs to be seen in the overall thematic context of the collection Dubliners. Dubliners deal with various kinds of constraints which render fulfilment impossible. People of all ages face these constraints. For instance, in the story entitled “A Little Cloud” professional success escapes Little Chandler. “Araby” is also part of the general ambience of frustration and failure in the Irish capital, which dismayed Joyce. What the protagonist of “Araby” encounters is the childhood equivalent of constraints and discontent in Dublin. The obstacle for the boy is the insensitive attitude of adults towards the needs of childhood and adolescence. In the tedium of everyday life and among people who do not care, his youthful love will also remain unfulfilled like his desire to buy his beloved a present. The language of the story conveys this stagnation, or lack of progress. For example, North Richmond Street is described as “blind,” suggesting a dead end. The setting of the story sets its atmosphere and mood. It is dark and dreary Dublin, the crucible of disillusionment and failure. The gloomy atmosphere of North Richmond Street anticipates what lies ahead for the boy. Over half the story is concerned with delays and frustrations. Each of Joyce’s stories ends in an epiphany, a revelation or realization. The essence or meaning of a situation is revealed in a moment. In the stories of Dubliners it is a moment of disillusionment, recognition of failure. It is a moment when the entire life of a character bears on the situation at hand. The negative epiphany of “Araby” occurs in the bazaar when the boy-­‐narrator realizes the failure of his dreams. Remember that for Joyce, trivial things or happenings are capable of an epiphany. In “Araby” it is the clinging of the coins in the market, which is the focus of the revelation. The story “Araby” has strong romantic elements. The narrator’s dreams are heroic and romantic. He goes on a lonely quest to procure a gift worthy of his beloved. The quest is not different in spirit from those which medieval knights embarked upon in the name of Ideal Love, personified here in Mangan’s sister. When the quest fails, the boy-­‐knight sees the world for what it is. This is both a movement from romance to realism and a growth from childhood fancies to the hard realities of adulthood. The world has lost its magic. It is no longer enchanted. Major themes in “Araby” The story Araby touches on a great number of themes. Let us discuss some of them. 1) Contrast between the ideal and the real One of the themes in the story is the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. The boy’s idealism and dreams of first love are ironically contrasted with the staid world around him. The street where he lives is gloomy and dull. His aunt and uncle are not aware of his intense anguish in love. The boy has an idealized image of the object of his love, Mangan’s sister. It is not so much Mangan’s sister as an actual person that captivates the narrator, but his idea of her. Since the narrator treats Mangan’s sister as only a romantic object of desire – as opposed to a person capable of desires – reality is destined to disappoint him. What disappoints him is not only the fact that his idea of love has been dashed, but the realization that he was so foolish to believe in it in the first place. Though his view of the world may hereafter be less romantic, the painful experience of reality helps the narrator come to self-­‐knowledge. The ideal gives way to the real in the case of the Araby bazaar too. In fact, the theme of discrepancy between the real and the ideal culminates in the bazaar. The market is certainly not a marvelous evocation of the West’s idealized and romanticized notions of the Middle East. The prospect of getting his beloved a splendid gift, a love token, invests the market with an aura. It becomes an enchanted place. The very syllables of the name “Araby” spell magic for the boy, and seem to have a mystical charm. But in reality, the bazaar is full of spurious wares. It is a place of tawdry make-­‐believe. The principle, which the market works on, is profit, not romance. The mundane sound of the coins late in the evening, after the shops have closed, destroys the boy’s sense of an “Eastern enchantment.” The market is revealed to be as dull as the street where the boy lives. The experience in the market also helps him realize that his love existed only in his mind. The boy senses the falsity of his dreams. 2) Coming of age “Araby” is a story about coming of age, or the movement from innocence to experience. It is because of this theme that the story immediately appeals to its readers. In other words, it is about the initiation of a young boy. The boy sets out in quest of the ideal. The quest fails, but the process ends in an inner awareness, which is the first step towards adulthood. This archetypal theme lends the story certain universality. Remember that the story is told in retrospect from the vantage point of maturity. The boy has grown up into an adult, who recollects the romantic adventure of his early adolescence. Indeed there is some irony when the mature author talks about the boy’s adolescent infatuation. But the reality of adolescence is conveyed sensitively. 3) Routine and escape Many characters in the stories of Dubliners are prisoners of routine. Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark their portrait. The details of North Richmond Street in “Araby” convey a sense of monotony in the lives of the people who live there. The boys who play in the neighbourhood are able, somehow, to discover some beauty and wonder even in the dull surroundings. The child protagonists of Joyce’s childhood stories, “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” and “Araby” yearn for a respite from the monotonous school routine. They feel lonely and bored in their regular routine. In “Araby,” the young boy wants to go to the bazaar to buy a gift for the girl he loves, because it offers escape and excitement. He becomes late because his uncle becomes mired in the routine of his workday himself. The ennui of the child reflects the drudgery and monotony of the adult world. Unfortunately, the longing for a change results in disappointment. There is no escape. It is a world of immobility or paralysis. 4) Religion and spirituality Despite being one of the strongholds of the Roman Catholic Church, Joyce found life in Dublin spiritually paralyzed. In the story “Grace” Joyce deals with the failure of organized religion to cater to the spiritual and emotional needs of the Irish. If we turn to “Araby,” ironically, the priest in the story is dead before the start. As the priest’s old possessions suggest, religious vitality and piety are matters of the past. Although we do not know the cause of the priest’s death, Joyce critics have pointed that the priest in the story “The Sisters,” which opens Dubliners and precedes “Araby,” died of syphilis. Although syphilis could also have a non-­‐sexual origin, probably this is Joyce’s impish way of connecting the Church with the repressive sexual morality of Dublin. In “Araby” too, religion is portrayed as moribund, life draining and hypocritical. There is hardly anything in North Richmond Street to evoke spirituality. It is a place of false piety and spiritual aridity. The boy shares these aspects of Dublin life. Mangan’s sister appears like a light in his dark and gloomy world. He invests her with the spiritual beauty, which is otherwise missing in life. He finds the vocabulary to describe his love within the experiences of his religious training. For example, the narrator imagines himself to be carrying thoughts of Mangan’s sister through his day as a priest would carry a Eucharistic chalice to the altar. In his imagination, sensual desire and sacred adoration blend. Mangan’s sister is both a saint to be worshipped and a woman to be desired – the blessed virgin and the voluptuous whore.